Between 1,000 and 5,000 people may have come into the New World after their ancestors spent 20,000 years in Beringia, according to a new genetic study published in Public Library of Science ONE. “Our theory predicts much of the archaeological evidence is underwater. That may explain why scientists hadn’t really considered a long-term occupation of Beringia,” said researcher Andrew Kitchen.
Italian scientists from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the University of Pavia compared the amount of arsenic in samples of Napoleon’s hair, to samples taken from his contemporaries, in order to test the theory that he’d been killed by his British captors.
Thailand passed its antiquities laws in 1961, and so it is possible that most of the artifacts in the U.S. from Ban Chiang, where official excavations began in 1974, were looted. “It’s not as easy as you would think to be up to date and conversant with different countries’ laws and to know which foreign laws the U.S. is committed to enforcing and which not,” Forrest McGill, chief curator at the Asian Art Museum, told the New York Times. That enforcement bit is the kicker, isn’t it?Â
Dredging in the San Antonio River uncovered what’s left of a dam built in the 1870s. Much of the dam had been cut away in the 1950s, and what was left had silted over. “This is probably the best-built dam the river has ever seen,” commented Boone Powell, the project architect.Â
Work on a dam in Milton, Florida, caused heavy damage to the Benjamin Jernigan Saw Mill site. The mill, built in 1829, gave the town its name.Â
How effective were the medicines prepared by the ancient Egyptians? Jackie Campbell of the University of Manchester evaluated 1,000 prescriptions recorded on four papyri dating from 1,800 B.C. to 1,200 B.C., and she found that “Sixty-four percent of the prescriptions had therapeutic value on a par with drugs used in the past 50 years.”
This entry was posted by Jessica E. Saraceni on
Wednesday, February 13, 2008.
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